5 Points and Miles Mistakes That Keep You From Booking the Trip You Want

Take the wrong 150,000-point welcome bonus and you can end up no closer to Paris than when you started. Use hotel points for a free stay and your family could still face $20,000+ in airfare. Credit every Delta flight to SkyMiles and miss the chance to earn Flying Blue miles that book Air France lie-flat business class for 60,000 points.

All five mistakes come from optimizing the points opportunity in front of you instead of the award trip you actually want. No. 1 rarely looks like a mistake at all. It sounds like expert advice, and by the time the flaw becomes obvious, months of spending can already be committed to points you cannot use.

You can earn bonus airline miles or credit card points through an online shopping portal by starting the purchase there instead of going directly to the merchant. At a portal rate of 10 miles per dollar, a planned $100 shoe purchase earns an extra 1,000 miles.

In most cases, earning portal bonus points doesn’t even require holding a credit card.

Shopping portals are the icing. Credit card signup bonuses are the cake.

A credit card signup bonus can add 50,000 to 80,000 points, and sometimes more, after you meet the minimum spending requirement with regular monthly expenses. An online shopping portal usually earns 5 to 10 points per dollar, with occasional promotions reaching 20 points per dollar or more.

Portal bonuses are tied to specific merchants. A credit card minimum spending requirement can usually be met with eligible household and business purchases across many merchants, concentrating that spending toward one much larger bonus.

Portal FOMO becomes expensive when you choose a pricier merchant or buy something you would have skipped just to earn the multiplier. Use shopping portals for planned purchases, but treat them as an extra layer on top of credit card signup bonuses.

Hotel credit cards can be tempting because their welcome bonuses often show six-figure totals. With a co-branded hotel credit card, you earn points in the hotel loyalty program printed on the card, along with hotel benefits such as free-night certificates, elite-night credits, status, or bonus points on paid stays.

A 150,000-point hotel bonus looks far more impressive than a 60,000-point bank bonus. You cannot tell from the headline total which bonus can fund the trip.

Consider a family of four planning a seven-night trip to Europe. Two hotel rooms at $450 or 30,000 points per room per night would cost about $6,300 or 420,000 points. Four international business-class tickets could require roughly 480,000 points or $20,000+ in cash.

The two redemptions require similar point totals, but leaving the flights unfunded creates a far larger cash obligation. Using points for the hotel still leaves the family facing $20,000+ for four business-class tickets.

Marriott Bonvoy points can transfer to airline programs, but every airline transfer requires multiple Bonvoy points for each airline mile received. The resulting airline-mile balance is far smaller than the original hotel-point total.

Fund the most expensive and difficult portion of the trip first. For many families traveling internationally, that means the airline tickets.

Flying an airline regularly does not mean you should credit every paid ticket to that airline’s loyalty program.

Airlines partner with other airlines who share the same alliance, and also with partners with no alliance affiliation. Typically, this relationships permits earning redeemable miles on these partners rather than on the carrier you’re flying.

You could credit an eligible Delta flight to Air France-KLM Flying Blue or Virgin Atlantic Flying Club instead of Delta SkyMiles. You could credit an eligible American Airlines flight to Alaska Atmos Rewards instead of AAdvantage. Where you credit the flight should depend on the frequent-flyer program you plan to use for your next award.

Is this Delta flight helping you reach Medallion status you will actually benefit from? Or would the miles be more valuable in Flying Blue, where Air France lie-flat business-class awards to Paris start at 60,000 miles one way compared to 325,000 plus SkyMiles?

Your frequent-flyer number should reflect the award you plan to book, not simply the airline operating the paid flight. Before adding one to a reservation, decide which loyalty currency you need next.

Travelers often rank a 100,000-point credit card offer above a 60,000-point offer because the number is larger. Points from different travel rewards programs are not equal units.

You might need 100,000 points in one program for an award flight that costs 60,000 through another. Credit card transfer partners, award prices, taxes, and carrier-imposed surcharges also differ. If the larger bonus belongs to a program that cannot book the flight you need, it provides no progress toward that trip.

Compare welcome bonuses by the award travel each one can fund after you meet the minimum spending requirement. A 60,000-point bonus can buy the flight you want, while a 100,000-point bonus often cannot because its points do not match your travel objective.

Before I recommend a travel credit card, I need to know where you want to go, how many people are traveling, whether you want economy, business class, or first class, and how much your dates can move.

Those details determine which airline programs offer enough award seats for the trip, how many points the awards require, and what you will pay in taxes and fees levied by the loyalty program. Only then can I identify the transferable credit card points and travel cards that provide access to those programs.

A recommendation made before that analysis is guesswork. Acting on it could leave you with points that do not transfer to the airline program you need, an available award with thousands of dollars in surcharges, and lower approval odds for the card that actually fits the trip.

No travel credit card is best for every traveler or every award trip. A sound recommendation begins with the destination, passenger count, cabin, and dates, then identifies the points currency and card needed to book it.

Which of these five points-and-miles mistakes has cost you the most?

Share your experience in the comments, and read How Points-and-Miles Travelers Become Points-Rich and Trip-Poor for a closer look at how a large rewards balance can still leave the trip you want out of reach.